The Client

CADE Farms

The Center for Agricultural Development and Entrepreneurship (CADE) is a farm and food business incubator with state-wide reach. CADE offers resources on everything from land stewardship to agribusiness development, as well as specialized programs and services, to support their clients and facilitate the success of local food systems.

What We Provided

Web Design
Web Development
UX/UI

Adaptability

CADE caters to the diversity of their clientele’s agribusiness needs with a tiered structure of offerings. Anyone can access their library of resources to learn about selling or leasing farmland, for example, but one-on-one help navigating the American Farmland Trust requires a consultation.

That tiered system and CADE’s identity as an organization was difficult to glean from their old website, which lacked visual cohesion and a clear representation of their offerings. And the clunky layout posed a specific challenge to agribusiness clients who aren’t the most tech savvy.

CADE needed a website that communicated who they are, what they offer, and where to find those offerings. It also needed to seamlessly meet their own team’s evaluation, client intake, and content management needs.

Our Approach

Because the folks at CADE came to Idea Kraft with specific features in mind, our web development team started with a discovery phase to ensure the solutions they pursued aligned with CADE’s goals. With that strategic approach, we refined and solidified the roadmap we needed to give CADE their clean slate.

Web Design

Sustainable local food systems are good for farmers, consumers, and the land – and we wanted CADE’s redesigned website to embody that.

The final redesign uses fun geometric elements and a rustic serif font to achieve a charming, boutique feel supported by an earthy color palette that feels like a breath of fresh air. The folks at CADE were even inspired to adjust the guidelines of their overall brand based on the redesign.

User Interface Design

CADE was facing a problem: Many potential clients were leaving the website unaware of their offerings. We used UI (User Interface) design principles to help users quickly understand what they’ll find on every page of the site.

We also kept things simple and easy on the eyes to avoid overwhelming visitors with lots of copy and visuals. Scannable text and streamlined graphics relating CADE’s real world impact offer visual variety, organically grabbing and keeping visitors’ attention.

And, instead of reading that CADE serves farms in almost every county in New York State, users can browse an interactive map of the state that lets them see CADE’s presence in their own county.

Functionality

As an organization, CADE has an impressive ability to cater to a variety of agribusinesses needs.

They needed their website to operate on that dynamic caliber – especially because so many of their open access offerings live right on the site, and new CADE clients sign up for consultations and services they need online.

Switching from Salesforce to HubSpot during the website redevelopment process was a huge step in the right direction for CADE’s needs. That’s because HubSpot offers intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities that allow CADE staff to further meet clients’ individual needs.

Information Architecture

CADE’s large library of resources has virtually everything farmers need to succeed. What it lacked was a UX-informed structure that made it easy to search and access.

And, with a subsection of clients who aren’t too tech savvy, great information architecture becomes even more crucial to the user experience. So Idea Kraft provided content direction to refine the resource library and then got to work creating a logical site navigation guided by UX design principles.

It’s always fulfilling to come away from a project feeling like we were able to work with the client to  accurately identify their pain points and find the solutions to address them. That was definitely the case with all of CADE’s website renovation, especially the functionality and information system portions.

The Result

The new website makes CADE’s mission and services immediately apparent to a wide variety of agribusiness owners, both by capturing the spirit of their work and organizing their services into a structure that’s logical and accessible to everyone.